“If you poured a bag of peanuts into the engine bay, I don’t think a single one of them would hit the floor,” comments Mathew Bennett. “It’s very snug in there.” Lotus Seven-type cars with motorcycle engines are scary machines. They weigh nothing at all and whip along at a frantic pace in bursts of peaky, inertia-free acceleration. I once frightened myself half to death driving such a car on a greasy circuit, which means I’m now hardwired to find the prospect of that sort of machine being armed with not one motorbike engine but two of the things completely terrifying. To Bennett, though, it’s just an engineering challenge.
“I bought the two bike engines, took a load of steel off a rack and fabricated the chassis,” he says, matter-of-factly. “The clearances are tiny.”
The car started life as an MK (Essex-based MK Sportscars has been building Lotus Seven-type chassis since 2000), but its engine bay had to be reconfigured to accept the two 998cc Kawasaki ZX-10R motors. The key component is the transfer case, which sits in the transmission tunnel and synchronises drive from the two power units before sending it via a conventional prop shaft to the rear axle. The transfer case had been built years before and had been gathering dust on a shelf at Tiger Racing until Bennett came calling. “Tiger sold me the case and I was away,” he says. The two engines develop 181bhp apiece, giving Bennett’s car a total of 362bhp. Weighing not much more than 500kg, it’s more accelerative through the gears than most supercars. “It’s only been on the road a few months. I go and get eggs and milk in it now.”
Credit: Autocar.co.uk